foundationsits values and the actions it performs and as a result it is apparent why each community
does what it does given what it believes and values (engeström et al. 1999).
The actions that a community performs emanate from the values that it holds
(Rokeach 1973; schein 1991). members of a community perform a variety of actions,
some arbitrary and some more purposeful, and some will make their way into the norms
for that community’s behaviour. Conformity to the community’s norms is usually the
way one determines whether a person is a member of that community. This involves
judging an explicit behaviour rather than trying to judge a person’s implicit values.
aiming to act in accordance with a community’s norms is a way of gaining admission
to a community. membership of a professional community often involves the adoption
of certain characteristic behaviours (Bourdieu 1992) and, as a consequence, these
become constituting behaviours.
a community formalizes its values as norms and codes of conduct through the
establishment of conventions. These conventions form a kind of shorthand for how to
act in ways that will satisfy the other members. however, over time these conventions
can become disconnected from their original rationale. as the community evolves,
certain actions that were once purposeful and undertaken mindfully may start to
be performed mindlessly. members of the community may not notice this and the
purposelessness of obsolete conventions may not be visible to individuals who have
been members of a community for a long time. purposelessness is often exposed when
new members join or when the boundaries of communities change and conventions
fail to adapt.
The values that are held by a community determine what are meaningful actions and
significant activities. Conventions represent and formalize what is valued and define
what is meaningful – likely to produce relevant outcomes; and what is significant –
likely to make a contribution that is of consequence to others. ensuring that actions are
meaningful is a professional competence that consists of critical reflection on practices,
and is facilitated by professional training. education and enculturation reinforce
the shared values, and as a result they are not discretionary (Weisner 2000). This
explanation is a social- psychological theory of knowledge rather than a correspondence
theory of what it is to know. The disadvantage of the correspondence theory is that it
encourages one to seek corresponding facts. The advantage of the social- psychological
theory is that it focuses attention on the users of research and the way in which certain
activities reinforce the aims and values of the community. one of our interests in this
chapter is why different communities find different value in the same activities.
Certain actions that are performed by a community are simply meaningless or
arbitrary owing to a lack of content. But others that are meaningful, when networked
together, form significant activities that have impact. Therefore, actions are meaningful
when they have a coherent relationship with the values of a community. This coherent
relationship characterizes that community and even non- members can appreciate its
internal coherence. significant activities are composed of a network of meaningful
actions. The community that performs the actions determines which are the meaningful
ones, with the aim of constructing a ‘value- reflecting’ set of actions, i.e. an activity
that is significant to the community. however, it is not the actions that characterize a
community because actions on their own do not have meaning. it is only through their
inter- connectedness to other meaningful actions that they become significant. Writing